A support group and a lab in the St. Louis area provide resources for people with the allergy to mammal products — and evidence that its effects can be reversed.
The Ag & Water Desk team in person, along with editors from our partner outlets, the Expert Journalists who serve as mentors, and various other Desk friends, in Columbia, Missouri. Credit: Sara Shipley Hiles/Ag & Water Desk
Last week, the Ag & Water Desk team met in person in Columbia, Missouri, to learn, brainstorm and, of course, do karaoke. We’ll spare you the details of that last point, but I will share that we had a productive field trip to the Bradford Research Farm to learn about regenerative agriculture and cover crops. We also went to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Columbia Environmental Research Center to learn about research on forever chemicals, endangered fish and mussels and more. Journalists shared how they tackled investigative stories, and scientists shared tips for evaluating research on environmental health.
Getting out of the office and seeing something in action lets us understand the issues, solutions and challenges more deeply, allowing us to write better, more clearly reported stories. For that, our time in Columbia was invaluable.
We also had time for fun! One of our treats was hearing Desk Editorial Director Tegan Wendland talk with writer Boyce Upholt about his new book, “The Great River,” at Skylark Bookshop in Columbia. Upholt is a longtime journalist who’s covered the Mississippi River and the book is a natural and human history of the watershed.
An edited excerpt of that conversation is below.
Boyce Upholt, left, is a writer who became interested in the Mississippi River after a canoe trip. His new book, right, unravels the river's history. Credit: Photo by Daniel Pierre-Louis, cover by W. W. Norton & Company
Boyce Upholt: I grew up in Connecticut and I wound up in Mississippi as a 25-year-old working for a nonprofit called Teach for America. I went there in part because I always knew I wanted to be a writer.
So that's where I started writing. But I didn't think much about the river…You can't see the river because of levees. I think I'd received this notion that's common in America, that the Mississippi River is just a big engineered ditch. And then I went out to profile a canoe guy that would take tourists out there. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is very much not a big engineered ditch.’
I think it's as beautiful as anywhere in the United States of America. Just big, sweeping sandbars, big islands, this huge wilderness. I was so entranced by the fact that this wilderness had been in my backyard for six years and I didn't know about it. And I wanted to know why? How? Why does nobody talk about it? That just grew and grew until eventually I was like, ‘Let me write a 300-page book that will tell the story of the entire Mississippi watershed.’
Wendland: How are you hoping your book changes other people's perspective and relationship with the river?
Upholt: I want more people to have that same experience.
Wendland: 1927 was the punctuation point in our relationship with the river, the Flood Control Act, the Army Corps [of Engineers] taking over the management of the river, and the beginning of engineering to serve humans. How has that changed how we relate to the river?
Upholt: From late 1926 until the spring of 1927, it rained all over the watershed. A number of flood crests came together down the lower Mississippi River and broke apart this levee system and devastated Mississippi, Louisiana, and the lower pieces of the watershed.
Some people look at the 1927 flood and see a moment of ecological wisdom because we got these things we call floodways and spillways where we decided that we’re not going to control this system with levees alone. We know we need to give the river room. But I always note that the levees after the 1927 flood got bigger and more intense, and so it became this notion of looking at the river as a machine.
In order to conceive of the river as a machine you have to think of it as a bunch of pipelines. Basically, you have to ignore the function of wetlands and just think of a river as a thing with carrying capacity.
Wendland: You talk a bit in your book about the long-term ramifications of those engineering decisions when it comes to equity. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Upholt: There are two reasons why we have engineered the river. First it was navigation. The thing that has always been carried on the river has been farm goods. Not until the 1880s did the federal government start building flood control infrastructure.
There's a lot of talk of like, ‘Oh, the economy would fall apart if we didn't have the Mississippi River and all the navigation on that.’ There aren't really very good economic studies showing that. The figures I see show that those dollars tend to go in a few people's pockets. And the rural farming economy is so small and trivial at this point that it doesn't really spread out.
If you look at a map of poverty, the lower Mississippi River stands out like a scar in the middle of the country. It's some of the highest rates of poverty anywhere. If we've saved $1.5 trillion in flood damages, why is it that the poverty rate is so high along this river?
By conceiving of the river as more than that, as a recreational space, as an ecological space, that may be a step towards better distributing the economy of the river.
Wendland: Talk about some of the changing ideas around working with nature rather than against it and the Indigenous relationship with the river. What are we learning about adaptation?
Upholt: People lived along this river for literally thousands of years. There's probably something to be learned from that.
Out in California, where wildfires are an issue, there's a real active discussion of traditional ecological knowledge and applying that in fighting wildfires. I don't yet see that discussion in the Mississippi watershed. There was and is a traditional ecological knowledge of flooding, but we're not talking yet about how to incorporate that into what we do. And that's in part, I think, Indian removal, the trauma of the loss of Indigenous knowledge on the river. But it's not entirely lost. And so I hope that next time I'm asked this question in a couple of years I can be like, ‘Oh, we really are working from it.’
Programs that provide drought relief to farmers use the U.S. Drought Monitor to determine eligibility, but some experts say it doesn’t always capture local conditions.
By Harshawn Ratanpal, KBIA
Wilburn Harris owns about 70 head of cattle and would have had to sell many of them last year if not for federal drought relief. Credit: Harshawn Ratanpal/KBIA
"The whole idea (of) this release program is to be proactive. What can we do to start recovery efforts now?” said Daren Riedle, wildlife diversity coordinator for Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.
By Julie Freijat, Flatland/Kansas City PBS
The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks released 40 alligator snapping turtles in various spots along the Neosho River. Alligator snapping turtles are the largest species of freshwater turtles in North America. Credit: Julie Freijat, Flatland
